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TEACHING INSIDE-OUT: on TEACHING ISLAM Author(S): Amir Hussain Source: Method & Theory in the Study of Religion , 2005, Vol

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TEACHING INSIDE-OUT: on TEACHING ISLAM Author(S): Amir Hussain Source: Method & Theory in the Study of Religion , 2005, Vol TEACHING INSIDE-OUT: ON TEACHING ISLAM Author(s): Amir Hussain Source: Method & Theory in the Study of Religion , 2005, Vol. 17, No. 3 (2005), pp. 248- 263 Published by: Brill Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23551737 REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23551737?seq=1&cid=pdf- reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Brill is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Method & Theory in the Study of Religion This content downloaded from 72.195.177.31 on Tue, 06 Jul 2021 16:18:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms TEACHING INSIDE-OUT: ON TEACHING ISLAM1 Amir Hussain2 It is in colleges and universities that Muslim students in North America usually have their first serious opportunities to learn about their own traditions and to articulate their own ways of being Muslim. There is a marked difference here from the experience of Christian or Jewish students. There are any numbers of Christian or Jewish schools in North America, in addition to a number of religious institutions of higher learning. By contrast, only a small percentage of Muslim students are the product of Islamic schools. They do not have the same oppor tunities to learn about their religion that are available to Jewish or Christian children. In this regard, there are a great many similarities with the other South Asian religions that are discussed in this volume. My own thoughts on the teaching of Islam have been shaped by a decade of trying to integrate theoretical issues with pedagogical con cerns. I began to teach courses on Islam at several different universi ties (McMaster University, the University of Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier University) in Southern Ontario in 1994. In 1997, I moved to Southern California to start teaching full-time at California State University, Northridge. Twelve relevant issues have arisen for me over the past decade of teaching Islam in North America.3 I have divided this list of issues into the following four categories: the assumptions of the instruc tor; the assumptions of the students; the role of the instructor in the modern university; and events post 9/11. 1 The title of this article is an allusion to Wilfred Cantwell Smith's collection of essays, On Understanding Islam. I am profoundly thankful to Wilfred and Muriel Smith for their impacts on me, both personally and professionally. 2 I wish to thank Arti Dhand, Eliza Kent, Stuart Ray Sarbacker, Deepak Sarma, Vasudha Narayanan and Anne Vallely for the conversations and presentations that led to this article. I also wish to thank Michel Desjardins for his close reading and comments on an earlier version of this article. 3 For a more detailed discussion of the issues involved, see Teaching Islam edited by Brannon Wheeler. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005 Method & Theory in the Study of Religion Also available online - www.brill.nl 17, 248-263 This content downloaded from 72.195.177.31 on Tue, 06 Jul 2021 16:18:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ON TEACHING ISLAM 249 1. The assumptions of the instructor 1. There is the question of teaching Islam. I use a deliberate ambigu ity here: although I always strive to teach about Islam, I am aware that I also teach Islam, mostly to Muslim students, but to non-Muslim stu dents as well. At the beginning of each course I ask students to say something about themselves, and why they are taking that particular course. Usually, about half of the students self-identify as Muslims, and many of them state that they are taking the course to learn more about their religion. With this, the easy dichotomy of religious studies versus theology becomes not so easy any more. The Muslim students are learn ing about Islam, but since it is their own tradition, it has a personal impact on many of them. They may have no other place to learn about their own tradition. Let me discuss a bit about my own history as a way of clarifying my thoughts on this issue. I completed a Ph.D. at the University of Toronto's Centre for the Study of Religion. There, I was taught by Donald Weibe and Neil McMullin about the academic study of reli gion, and how it was different from the teaching (or doing, for that matter) of theology. I have always advocated the religious studies par adigm (i.e., as a secular, non-confessional discipline), and was fortunate to have conversations about this with another fellow graduate student who is well known to readers of MTSR, Russell McCutcheon. However, when I began to teach courses on Islam, I realized that there were no North American seminaries to which I could send students who wanted a more theological approach to their tradition. There was no Muslim equivalent of the Toronto School of Theology. Moreover, no matter how adamant I was that my courses on Islam were about this religious tradition, for some of my Muslim students, this class presented the only opportunity for them to seriously engage with their own religious under standings. I would also argue that for religious non-Muslim students, my class also allowed for them to add Islam to the list of traditions against which they had to define themselves. Complicating all of this was my own Muslim identity (discussed below). Many times students would ask me what I, as one particular Muslim, thought of a particular issue. Or they might ask me about my own practices with some part of the tradition (e.g. "What's it like to fast during Ramadan?" or "Have you made the Hajj?"). Generally, when students ask me for my personal opinions, I give them, but am always explicit that these are my personal opinions, and not necessarily those of other Muslims. Of course whenever my own opinions are in conflict This content downloaded from 72.195.177.31 on Tue, 06 Jul 2021 16:18:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 250 AMIR HUSSAIN with those of other Muslims, I try to list the points on which we differ. All of this to say that in trying to be in the religious studies mode, I sometimes (unintentionally) end up being the closest substitute for a Muslim theologian that my students will encounter. Sam Gill has written (2002: 222-223) the following about the dicho tomies in our academic lives: We divide scholars into schools and traditions. The theological versus the academic is a standard one. I have recently dealt with this division in an article entitled "Embodied theology" (Gill in press). The distinction of "tex tualists" versus "comparativists" or "theorists" is another. The religious and cultural identity of scholars—insiders versus outsiders—is another. And so on. What I have argued is that our field cannot exist without doing both kinds of work, without wholly embracing the antithesis and, indeed, it should hold this as its hallmark. Perhaps the issues that I am describing come from dealing with this antithesis. 2. There is mixed in with the above the issue of who teaches whom. Muslims/non-Muslims teach Muslims/non-Muslims. Jane McAuliffe, now Dean of Arts at Georgetown University, has talked about what it meant for her as a Catholic to teach Islam to Muslim graduate stu dents at the University of Toronto, where at times she was the only non-Muslim (and also the only female) in the classroom. One also thinks about the questions of gender raised by Annemarie Schimmel when she was the only woman teaching at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Turkey. In my own classes on Islam, between 30 and 50% of the students self describe themselves as Muslim. What attitude does the instructor, usually non-Muslim, have to Muslim students in his or her class? On January 4, 2000, the Detroit Mews reported that Muslim students at two community colleges had filed complaints against their instructors (Cohen 2000a). One student at Washtenaw Community College was prevented from saying "bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim" before the beginning of her presentation. She was offered a formal apology by the college's president the next day (Cohen 2000b). Here one sees another facet of the religious studies versus the ology question. If the student is a believing Muslim and wants to begin all of her public presentations with a standard invocation, why should she be prevented from doing so? In past centuries, certain universities were closed to "unbelievers" (Masuzawa 2003: 322). In the modern sec ular university, should we exclude all expressions of religious belief? All of my syllabi contain a section first articulated by Tina Pippin with her This content downloaded from 72.195.177.31 on Tue, 06 Jul 2021 16:18:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms ON TEACHING ISLAM 251 students. In part, that section reads: "we have the right to voice an opinion that is based on a self-chosen value system; we have the right to dissent or differ from the professor and from others in class".
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